Panasonic Jungle Vs Sony NGP: First PSP 2 Victim

With Panasonic making strides in camera technology they thought that they would see if they could have the same success in the handheld gaming console market. The device that they came up with was the Panasonic Jungle, but we fear that the threat of the Sony NGP could have led to the device being canceled. Has the PSP 2 claimed its first victim?

We first learned of the Jungle back in October of last year, and it was just two months later when Panasonic started public testing. Some of you might have thought that taking on Canon and Nikon was one thing, but Sony and Nintendo is totally different. The gaming market is a whole lot tougher than the camera market, and it looks as though Panasonic has learned the hard way.

The company had been in the gaming industry before, and had to leave it because of the huge impact that both Sony and Microsoft had on the market. There is said to be a number of reasons why development stopped, and Reuters learned that some of it came from within. According to a recent company statement it read, “Panasonic decided to suspend further development due to changes in the market and in our own strategic direction”. This can be taken in so many ways.

When we saw the first images of the Panasonic Jungle, it did not take an expert to realize that things were going to be tough. The biggest issue we had was the design; it just looked too big and chunky when compared to other such devices on the market. Looking at the Jungle compared to the NGP, the former looks as though it was designed a decade ago.

It is hard to say how much time and money Panasonic put in to this project, but it is better to cancel now than the possibility of being humiliated when it came to market?